5 DATING TIPS FOR SONS OF SERIAL KILLERS
I decided to tell Cori about my father on our first official date. With others—three, anyhow—I had waited until the third date, which is where the budding relationships ceased to bud. That’s why I waited. But not with Cori. The more I got to know her, the more I dreaded the void she’d leave when she left. The sooner I scared her off, the better off I’d be. Cori too.
I didn’t work Mondays in winter and she started only after lunch. A breakfast date was just about our speed. She had suggested Coffee Traders in Saratoga. “Ever had a Death Wish?” she’d asked.
I began to formulate a bullshit denial when it dawned on me she was talking about the coffee brand. “It’s what we serve at Loony Scoops,” I said.
She was holding fort at a table in the back, mug in hand, as I ambled through the door.
“Wow,” she said, admiring my getup—Asics, Levi’s, navy sweatshirt, black ski jacket. “A whole new you.”
“Revelatory, huh?”
“Earthshaking.”
We hugged. She kissed me lightly on the lips. I kissed her less lightly. And my heart sank in anticipation of the blowback to come. Death Row Dad was breathing down my neck. Spit it out, boy. Spit it out.
The morning rush was over, the queue short. I explored the chalkboard menus by the cash up front, ordered a large Death Wish along with a bacon grilled cheese for me and an egg and avocado wrap for Cori. She offered to pay, as expected. “I’m taking you out,” I said, flashing a wad of fresh one-dollar bills. “Your donations to Loony Scoops should cover it.”
Coffee Traders is compact, homey, and three times as long as it is wide. First impression is funky on the side of grunge, with a hipster vibe that starts with the staff and ends with the shelves of vintage candy at the rear. There are a dozen tables throughout and a scattering on the street for when the weather cooperates.
We concentrated on our sandwiches, segueing into uneasy small-talk that hiccupped through the predictable—the weather, the menu, the baristas, the baristas’ tats, the baristas’ piercings, the baristas’ hair. Neither of us had counted on awkward, but awkward it was. Calling it a date had formalized whatever had been developing between us. The newness sucked. We needed to find our old selves again, to the extent we had old selves. Cori addressed the obvious: “I wanted to come here because of the intimacy. But it’s having the opposite effect on us. Like we’re on a blind date.”
“Blame me,” I said.
“What’s going on?”
“Ah, nothing,” I lied. “Work stuff. I’m sorry.” Spit it out, boy. Spit it out.
“Anything I can help with? Should I be coming more often, eating more sundaes?”
I laughed. “Nah. Just give me a couple of minutes. I’ll be okay. I’m sorry. Really sorry.”
She followed up her wrap with a caramel macchiato and a muffin chaser. “Food is fuel,” she said. “I try to get a run in every morning. Four, five miles, at least.”
“So that explains it,” I said, without a clue as to what it was, and worried my it came across as smarmy.
We had never strayed far beyond the superficial. Rehashing the same-old/same-old was starting to wear. We both knew it too. The ins and outs of ice cream. The ins and outs of dentistry. Books. Movies. TV. Apps. Android versus Apple. Abridged and redacted anecdotes of our respective childhoods. We were sidestepping the elephant in the coffee shop—our true selves.
We’d talk, go silent, and begin anew. I had my reasons for keeping the conversation generic, but what were hers? Unless putting up barriers was all we had in common.
I wasn’t ready to give up on her or me, but I was entering the homestretch when Cori called it. “This can’t continue. Not like this.”
“I know,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“And me, I need to tell you something too.”
I let her go first, thinking she might let me off the hook, part ways with me for her own good reasons, rather than the one good reason I was about to provide.
“That night I showed up at your place for the first time, it wasn’t by chance. The thing you need to know, the thing I haven’t told you, I liked you even before I met you.”
I hadn’t seen this coming.
“You see, there’d been this story about you, and there was this picture—you were putting a cherry on a sundae . . . ”
“The Times Union thing? That was two years ago.”
“Almost. Yes. I was still in Montreal. I was googling the area and, well, you popped up. And I can’t tell you why, because I don’t know why, but there was something about it. About you.”
“C’mon, a soda jerk putting a cherry on a sundae? Oh, yeah, every woman’s fantasy—Brad Pitt with a scoop.”
“No, honest. I swear. Now I won’t say it was love at first sight or anything so dumb, but I couldn’t get you out of my head. Like it was fate or whatever.” She was blushing. I was blushing. Every soul in Coffee Traders should have been blushing. “And now, truth is, you’re in my head more than ever. I like you. I like your messy brown hair and the blue of your eyes and the way you listen to people, like you’re listening to me now.”
Oh, Jesus! I combed my fingers through my hair. Ah, jeez.
“There’s something special and good about you, like I’ve known you all my life. I know, I can see, I’m scaring you off, coming on too strong, too fast. But I can’t keep it in any longer. I am never this forward, not with anyone. Not ever. I just need to know if you feel the same, if whatever we’re doing is worth pursuing. Because right now, the last hour, it doesn’t feel good in any way.”
“Like we’ve hit a wall,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Now as breathlessly goo-goo-eyed as this scene appeared to the Coffee Traders’ faithful, and as warm, loving, and heartfelt as the moment was to Cori, I found myself at the mercy of the adolescent me. My hormones were in free fall, my heart along for the ride. Beneath the table, my right leg was shredding to the Metallica blasting in my braincase. I was twenty-six years old going on sixteen. I wanted to jump into bed with her. I wanted to have children with her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Hell, I wanted her inside and out, banality be damned. I needed to put an end to this misery, swap it out for a more familiar misery. “My father is a serial killer.”
“Pardon?” She tilted her head, squinted, as if I might be speaking in tongues. “What?”
I groped for a nicer way to put it. “My father. He killed people. Lots of people.”
“What are you saying?” Simultaneous translation would have been helpful. “He’s like a serial killer?”
“Not like. He is.”
I watched, waited. Next, if true to the pattern established by my previous unrequited true loves, Cori would say, “Are you trying to be funny?” or words to this effect. And with combined disgust, pity, indignation, and terror, she would denounce my cruelty, my tastelessness—“Joke or not!”—and on a swell of bitter tears, off she’d scoot, forever traumatized by the sick fuck she’d been so foolish to have fallen for.
She brushed muffin crumbs from her sleeve. “You’re serious?”
I was at a loss. I’d never been obliged to take the big reveal further. Why was she still sitting there?
“Who did he kill?” she asked.
“Anybody. Everybody.”
“Why?”
“He never said.”
“Never?”
“Nope.”
“C’mon, he never told you?”
“Far as I know, he’s never told anyone.”
She raised her mug, savored the warmth. Behind us, a barista tidied up the candy shelves. He was dressed in black. His hair was green. The holes in his earlobes were the size of quarters. His arms were a gallery of tats, the Millennium Falcon and Sonic the Hedgehog the highlights.
“I’m sorry, Cori. Sooner or later, you’d find out. Better to come from me.”
She propped her elbows on the table, rested her chin upon a latticework of fingers. She stared me down, direct and matter-of-fact. “Are you one too?”
“What?” I’d heard her, all right. She was not the first to ask.
“A serial killer, Rob. Are you one too?”
I tried to read her.
She folded her arms across her red-knit sweater, rocked back on the legs of her chair. “It’s not a trick question.”
What did she expect me to do, confess I did not know for certain? Killing one or two people might not be a disease, but killing upward of twenty-seven likely was. No stopping, once you start. Like those hapless OCDers who tie and untie their shoelaces a kazillion times a day. Could killing be passed on father to son, same as high cholesterol, male pattern baldness, or a career in confections? And it wasn’t like I’d never had the urge. Like who hasn’t? Everybody wants to kill somebody sometime. “No,” I said, with less certainty than I would have liked. “I am not one too.”
“Wow,” she said. “Just plain wow. Do you think so poorly of me? Do you think I would have asked such a ludicrous question if for one second I believed you were?”
“I’m stupid.”
“And I’m stupid for making you feel stupid.”
“Talking about him isn’t easy. Scares people off.”
“Is that what you wanted, to scare me off?”
I shook my head.
“So you were testing me?”
“Look, for better or worse, my father is a huge part of who I am. I hate it. But I live with it. And anyone who’s going to share my life, whether it’s five minutes or fifty years, has to live with it too.”
“Share your life? Now who’s rushing things?”
“You know what I’m saying. It doesn’t scare you?”
“Of course. But you don’t.”
“You haven’t heard it all.”
“And if I do?”
“That’s up to you.”
“You think you’re the first boyfriend I’ve had with skeletons in his closet?”
“Yeah, Cori, but my skeletons are skeletons.”
“Agreed. Your baggage is a bit heavier than most boyfriends’—”
“Really? You’re not going to run?”
“Let’s just see if I’m still here by the time you’re done talking. So you had better make it good. I want to know everything.”
I told her as much as I dared, though not all that I knew. I kept it simple. Henry Taylor Dickens. His kills. His arrest. The incriminating peanut brittle. The nickname. His confession. My conversion from Bobby Dickens to Bobby Blessing. My exodus from Hillsdale. My mom’s exodus from me. Boarding school. Dad’s ever-delayed execution. And how I had built my life not upon the succor of friends and family, but by avoiding it.
“Early on, my mom sent me to this psychologist, Doctor Cutcheon. She said there was only one thing I needed to understand: Happiness is a myth. The best anyone can hope to be in life is less unhappy. If I could accept this, the rest would fall into place.”
“That’s a terrible thing to tell a child.”
“Worked for me.”
“If you say so.”
Cori sat quietly for a long while, plotting her escape, no doubt. It was only fair I give her the out. “No need to stick around. No hard feelings. In your shoes, I would have been gone an hour ago.”
“Really, you fit into a women’s size seven?” she said. I laughed, though she wasn’t kidding. She was feeling sorry for me. Had it been anyone else, I’d have been pissed. Wasn’t my nature to solicit pity. Sympathy gave me the hives. “You know, I’m thinking, you just might be the loneliest person I have ever met. How have you survived? How do you carry all this inside of you? How are you even you?”
“Dr. Cutcheon.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Kids are pawns. She made clear it wasn’t my fault. And there was nothing wrong whether I loved my dad or hated him. But the toughest part, you know what it was? It wasn’t coming to terms with what he’d done. I knew what he’d done. It was how the papers and TV made him look, how everyone lapped it up, as if he was less than human. I know it sounds nuts, Cori, but my dad was a good guy. Until he wasn’t. I’m not saying people didn’t have cause to fear him, it’s just . . . I dunno.”
“So which is it? Do you love him or hate him?”
“You tell me. What would it be if he was your father?”
“He’s still alive?”
“Prison. Florida.”
“Do you visit him?”
“What?”
“Do you visit him?”
“I haven’t seen him since the day he was caught. Not in person, anyhow. I mean, every now and then I’ll come across something. A news thing. Those true crime shows. A podcast. I try to stay away from them. They’re all bullshit. I wrote him once or twice at the beginning and he wrote back, but we had nothing to say. All of a sudden we were strangers. Later, with my mother taking off and all, I needed to take care of me.”
“Surely you must want to see him before he dies. Once more, at least?”
“His execution has been set and changed so many times, I’ve stopped keeping track. It’s been so long, when I think of my father, it’s in the past tense. Sometimes, he’s not even real to me. I’m not sure his physical death will make a difference. Truth is, I haven’t thought of him in terms of The Living for years.”
I’d taken her breath away. She blotted tears from her cheeks, mascara running. I apologized, though in the dark as to what I was apologizing for. She’d asked for it. This was uncharted territory, don’t forget. Never had the discussion gone beyond “my dad, the serial killer.” I had told Cori stuff I’d never told anyone, myself included.
She squeezed my hand as I walked her to her car. She was parked in front of Northshire Bookstore, which I guess prompted her to say, “You should write a book.”
“Yeah. Right. I’ll become a role model, show how children of serial killers can grow up to be normal, healthy human beings, leading fulfilling and productive lives.”
“You never know,” she said. “There are plenty of screwy kids out there these days, some screwier than you.”
“Screwier than me? C’mon?”
“You have no idea,” she said, and twirled to face me. She threw the flats of her hands onto my chest, backed me up against her BMW. A red 650i.
“You mystify me,” I said.
“Aha! So my plan’s working . . . ”
“Yeah, from the day I met you, I’ve seen you as more of a Prius type.”
She sort of smiled, fixed her eyes on mine, guided my hand to her mouth, kissed me on the fleshy round of my thumb, and took a not unpleasant nibble. “I’ve got two hours before my first patient. All that sadness you keep inside, I know exactly what you need.”
“A miracle cure?”
“An established therapy.”
“Your place or mine?” I said.
“Smooth.”
“I’ve got more, if you want. I’ve memorized the entire Playa’s Handbook of Cheesy Things to Say on a First Date, cover to cover.”
“Too cute,” she said, patted the top of my head, and pushed me into the car.